Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg film review — riveting and sober portrait

Actress, model, style icon, partner of Keith Richards: the life of Anita Pallenberg was a full-blown picaresque saga. That’s certainly how it comes across in the autobiographical manuscript discovered after her death; read by Scarlett Johansson, it forms the basis of documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg. Born to German parents, Pallenberg grew up in Rome and was a model and a fixture of the New York underground before making her mark with a series of film roles, culminating in 1970’s transcendentally unsettling Performance. Today, however, she is mostly remembered as an imperiously vampish scenester who embodied the rock lifestyle at its most glamorous — and sometimes, the film shows, most depressing.

Richards is heard admiringly confessing, “I was trying to keep up with her.” His own rakish visual image was partly derived from his wearing her clothes. In footage of the couple in flounces and floppy hats in Cannes in 1967 (she was there as a film star, he was her plus one), she is insouciantly magnificent, while he — to use a very Sixties term — looks a right spotty ’erbert.

Drugs, and resulting police attention, took their toll, not least on the couple’s children. Their son Marlon Richards, now in his fifties and an executive producer here, recounts a memory of coming home one day, aged 10 in upstate New York, that must rank high among nightmare tales of the outlaw life. You have to marvel at the sanity that both Marlon and his sister Angela appear to have sustained, as they recall their childhoods lucidly and without apparent bitterness.

Pallenberg eventually returned from addiction and obscurity, and died in 2017, a revered fashion doyenne. You can only wonder what she might have achieved, given the wilfulness and dazzle of her youth. Nevertheless the autobiographical passages we hear suggest a significant triumph in hard-won self-knowledge. Directors Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill have adeptly collated a riveting story, and an intensely sobering one.

★★★★☆

In cinemas now